The new Wexner Center Exhibition Cruzamentos: Contemporary Art in Brazil opens tomorrow (Friday January 31st), which gives me the chance to let you know about an exciting project that I have assigned the 662 (no, that is not a typo!) students in my Classics 2220: Classical Mythology class this semester. In the final section of […]
On the last page of the current issue of BOMB magazine, I encountered two strange sketches: one a giant monster with its nails being manicured by an army of cosmeticians, and the other a centaur-actor on a film-set, surrounded by half sheep, half man director and crew. : These bizarre drawings belong to Japanese, New […]
Dani Leventhal (OSU Dept. of Art) and I have just found out that our proposal for an OSU Humanities Institute Pilot Working Group has been accepted for this Semester.The group is called Rough Draft and will explore the theory and practice of incorporating contemporary practices of the visual methods of drawing, mapping and diagramming in […]
Fresh from my flying visit to Los Angeles for the opening of William E. Jones: Heralitus Fragment 124, Automatically Illustrated at the David Kordansky Gallery, I thought I would share with you a couple of thoughts about how I translated the fragment, which William E. Jones transformed into one of the works in the exhibition […]
Here is a shameless plug for the upcoming William E. Jones exhibition, for which I contributed an essay for the catalogue. Also, William and I will be having a conversation before the opening – this Saturday January 11th – on the topic of ‘Heraclitus in Limbo’. If there are any L.A.-based Classicists out there, it […]
As I was soaking up the last day of the Wexner Center’s wonderful Blues for Smoke exhibition today, I finally had a moment to pay closer attention to one of the works that had intrigued me in previous, rushed visits: Jimmie Durham’s The Caliban Codex. Jimmie Durham Caliban’s Mask, 1992 In a sequence of diary […]
I believe in Godas fully physical thus the Outer Předmostof the World on which we ‘hang’as though it were wood and our own bodies arehanging on it – Charles Olson Maximus Poems, III, 13, 1963 Allen Ginsberg Charles Olson “Poet Maximus elder” during the Vancouver Poetry Conference, July 1963. c. Allen Ginsberg Estate Ben Shahn, Maximus […]
Painted sometime between 1938 and 1941, a work of Rothko’s so-called ‘mythic’ period, before his ‘classic’ work of the 1950s, Antigone depicts a tangle of torsos, rising from a rectangular blue box of feet and other strange objects, coalescing into a series of four (or five) heads – two red-faced males, one with curly hair […]
Dani Leventhal, Untitled, 1999 This startling quotation comes from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Language, which I stumbled across while idly leafing through Jacques Derrida’s Memoirs of the Blind. The statement is a reference to the famous anecdote about the origin of drawing or painting that was first described by Pliny the Elder […]
I have no idea who (if anyone) reads this blog, so I thought I would try a little experiment to see who is out there & at the same time, discover a little something about you, specifically if it is your curiosity about the Classical or the Contemporary (or both) that brings you here. To […]